Building on what’s strong: Wired to grow
Jon Barnes, a consultant working with organisations looking to become more adaptive, self-organising and developmental, explores what a strength-based approach looks like in practice.
A couple of years ago, in experimenting with a new diet, I discovered a simple framing effect that made the difference between my intention to eat differently succeeding or not. I realised that the reason I was finding it laborious and was lacking creativity, was because my entire focus was on what I couldn’t eat. So I thought of a few things that I could eat and more importantly that I liked (even loved) eating. Suddenly I was excited to cook new dishes and my new diet went from being a burden to being indulgent and creative fun. The shift was a simple matter of framing and focus. What we focus on, grows.
In my work helping organisations become more adaptive, I have noticed a similar pattern. Particularly where it comes to creating change, there is a tendency to only look for the problems. And whilst focussing on problem solving is incredibly valuable in many circumstances (like creating the largest vaccine rollout in history in record time!), I’m not always sure it is in others. It is a bit like those figure and ground images perhaps. Where we forget to look for the negative space.
‘Change is hard’
When it comes to organisational change, I have in the past found leaders too quick to want to look at which parts of the business are under performing. There is a focus on what’s not working and who is to blame. I have actually found that this approach of focussing on the problem can feel like the equivalent of pushing a rock up a hill. It’s hard and it’s impossible to gather momentum or to benefit from compound effects. This is why, when looking where to start with an organisational change process, I have gradually settled on quite a different approach, which in my experience very readily accelerates in pace, scale, intrinsic motivation and ease. Let me explain.
Finding the 13% percent
Gallup’s now famous global workplace study tells us that only 13% of people are actively engaged in their work, that 27% are disengaged and that the remaining 60% are actively disengaged in their work. When I write these three numbers up on a flip chart, leaders tend to ask: “How do we change that 60%?”, to which I tend to respond something like: “By focusing on the 13% and leaving the door open for others to join the party.” I have found (through trial and error), that by focussing on the 13%, by giving them ample freedom and autonomy, by giving them space to create the workplace they want to create, by providing them with new ideas and perspectives to freely integrate into their work, change can become viral. Gradually some of the 27% start to join.
And I would argue that it’s even possible that we can reach a tipping point. This is sometimes referred to as “The 25 Percent Rule”. This is the idea that social norms can be changed ‘simply’ by convincing 25% of a group, and that we then benefit from a domino effect. That if that 13% grew to 25%, soon we could have almost everybody on board. So how can this work in practice? Let me share a couple of different, very practical examples.
The Power of Volunteering
In his seminal book The Fifth Discipline, legendary organisational thinker Peter Senge once said: “People don’t resist change. They resist being changed.” This is what in the behavioural sciences is sometimes called reactance. The antithesis of this, is to promote people’s freedom by inviting them to volunteer. I have done this in a few ways, and it has over time become a core (even non-negotiable) part of my approach to organisational change with clients. I’ll try to share practical examples by making them widely applicable:
Ask the group what they would like to create
My favourite and most effective session to run in an organisation goes something like this. I get the group together (I’ve done this with over 100 people at once) and ask them individually and in pairs to discuss what they would like this organisation to be like. Then they cluster their desires into similar groupings, eventually ending up with a kind of map of the common desires of the entire group. Then I spread these areas around the room (or digital ‘room’) and ask them to stand where they have most energy to create change. They then create a plan focusing on what they want to get done in the next 3 months, 3 weeks, 3 days, and finally 3 minutes. The idea is to start very small and then build from there. I sometimes call it Agile Activism.
I have done this with countless organisations, and in some instances found that when I visited over a year later, these projects were still flourishing without any formal or hierarchical command for them to do so. When we get out of the way and give people the space to create what they want, I find that on average, they do.
One anecdote I have was one group that wanted to hot-desk. So they start trialling ‘Hot desk Tuesdays’. Only on the following Tuesday, they realised none of their landlines worked at their new desks. So they forwarded them to their mobiles. In which case, they thought, why not actually work from home anyway. To work well remotely they then decided it would be better to change other ways of working, such as being more trust-based, self-organising and to do more work and communication in public cloud based applications rather than siloed hard drives… You get the point. It rippled.
Another organisation I worked in had two small groups who wanted to trial Slack. Soon other groups did that too. Eventually they merged them all and moved 300 people from email to Slack over a few months without enforcing that until they were nearly all the way there anyway. Again. It spread organically. No need for coercion.
Getting paid to learn
Another problem orientated approach I’m starting to question is feedback. We tend to think that for somebody to grow, they need to be told exactly what they need to get better at. In my experience, this has more downsides than upsides. One is that it can backfire. The amygdala (the small, ancient part near the base of our brains in charge of fight or flight) can hijack the prefrontal cortex (the more modern ‘executive’ part at the front of skulls), making it quasi-impossible to learn. I’ve also wondered more and more, is feedback just us wanting to control others and not really trusting that given the right conditions, people on average, want to grow anyway. Feedback also assumes that we wouldn’t reach the requisite self-awareness through self-enquiry (which is I think, the skill we most need to develop in order to increase our sense making capacity), and furthermore, it assumes that the person giving us the feedback is in some way more clear sighted and unbiased, which would itself depend on their own level of self-enquiry. So it’s a bit like having a very biased scientist run a study without any rigorous controls in place.
My experiment recently has been to take groups through self-reflection processes, where they look at their own weaknesses, strengths, dreams and desires from their own point of view. All self-defined with no coercion to share. They then ask themselves “What project would help me learn this? Who do I know who could help me? What day to day habits would help me improve in this self-defined area”. So far, this has been very positive. I’ve framed it to the people I work with in client organisations as such: “What do you want to get paid to learn?” We’re even thinking of replacing appraisals with this and have just prototyped a project marketplace where projects are broken down into roles advertised internally around the company with a list of ‘potential learning opportunities’ next to each role. My dream is that you get paid to learn, trying out new roles all within the same organisation.
In summary
I am increasingly finding that where it comes to organisational change, solving problems is often less effective and more painful than letting the natural energy people have to emerge. I am finding that whilst this can start very small, it can speed up quite quickly and soon even be uncontained.
So my current approach is I guess what some would call strength based. I currently believe that by creating opportunities for people to opt-in to new projects and new learning opportunities, by providing resources and frameworks for self-reflection, people gradually take what is theirs and find huge intrinsic motivation. Over time, this can spread and becomes the new culture.
Jon Barnes is a consultant working with organisations looking to become more adaptive, self-organising and developmental. He is the author of several short books including Wilding Organisations: a ramble about human growth at work, has debated at the famous Hay-On-Wye Philosophy Festival on the subjects of digital democracy and is a two times TEDx speaker recently researching child-led education. He lives in the countryside with his wife and son whom they homeschool.
